The Right Choice - 1967 Lancia Fulvia

An ultimatum jump-starts the restoration of a 1967 Lancia Fulvia by its longtime owner

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

The restoration of a Lancia doesn't pose the same challenge that it did a few years ago, before the car's rising popularity with collectors encouraged aftermarket suppliers to begin making reproduction parts. Back then, you had to have been a dyed-in-the-wool Lancisti to go through the work of tracking down the parts and expertise you'd need to bring a badly deteriorated car back to life.
Steve Digilio is just such an enthusiast. For 40 years, he's owned the 1967 Lancia Fulvia 1.3 Rallye featured here, a car that was once so badly rusted that it "was getting ready to break in half." The marque made a big impression on him long before that, though, back in the days when he could only dream of someday having his driver's license. He recalls the moment, and tells the story:
"My Uncle Armand had a 1953 Aurelia coupe, right-hand drive. He was in his late 20s; I must have been six or seven. And we go out Sunday morning, and he's blasting through the streets of White Plains. And there's nobody around--nobody. And he comes into this rotary. Now, I'm in the left side of the car, and at the time, what the heck was a seatbelt? We're going into a left turn, and he's really moving this car. And the next thing I know, the passenger door opens. He, without missing a beat, with his right hand on the steering wheel, leans over in front of me, shuts the door, looks at me and says, 'Do not tell your mother.' That was it."
Seven or eight years later, it was again Armand who baited the Fulvia hook for Steve. On Christmas Eve in 1967, he spotted an exotic little red car parked in his uncle's driveway. "I think, 'What in God's name is this thing?' I open the door and see a black interior with a wooden steering wheel and this big stick shift coming out of the center of the floor. I say, 'Hey, Uncle Armand, what is that red thing?' He says, 'It's a Lancia Fulvia.' I say, 'A what?'"
Steve's first car was a Fiat 850 Spider, but he was eventually--and briefly--driving Uncle Armand's red Fulvia. He'd had the car just over a year when he and a friend rolled it over on a cold and snowy night in February 1973 while taking part in their first road rally. "Our first and last," he laughs. "We were not injured, except for our egos, being 19 years old, and not knowing what was going on."
Time to find another Fulvia, and in 1973, there was one place that every enthusiast in the Northeast made sure to check: the classifieds in the back of the sports section of the Sunday New York Times. He found one in New Jersey. The sellers were American Lancia Club members, like Steve, and their car had some rust and a knock in the engine. The rust he lived with; the engine he had rebuilt by Domenico Spadaro, the proprietor of Dominick European Car Repair in White Plains, New York (HS&EC #79, March 2012), a shop his Uncle Armand--who else?--had introduced him to. "He was the maestro of these cars," Steve says. He couldn't have known it, but he had just started on a decades-long journey of bringing his Fulvia to better-than-new condition.
"I used it as my high school, college and everyday car, up until 1979," Steve says. "By then, it was getting really rusty. I parked it and bought an Alfa Berlina, which I had for a couple of years. Then, one afternoon at Dominick's, I was talking to Dominick and his sons, Frank and Santo, and I said, 'Let's try to restore this car.' Who knew what I was getting into! We took it apart, and that thing was getting ready to break in half. It was an absolute basket case."
The car was parked in Dominick's basement, and Steve would drop by on weekends, when he could, to do a little more disassembly work. He removed fasteners and components, storing them in labeled Ziploc bags and bringing them home for storage. The engine and gearbox were mounted to a front subframe, which was held to the unit body by six bolts; removing the radiator and disconnecting the wiring allowed the whole assembly to drop away from the car. Everything came out of the body shell but the headliner and the wiring harness.
The good news was that the Lancia was held together by high-quality, copper-plated bolts, which came out without coaxing from a propane torch or PBlaster; the bad news was that "underneath, the rocker panels, everything--it was just a freaking mess. I said, 'Oh my God, what have I gotten into?'" Steve, disheartened, stopped dropping by the shop on weekends. For the next two years, the disassembled hulk gathered dust.
"Finally, Frank said, 'Steve, decide what you want to do--fix the car, or sell it," Steve says. Selling it was out of the question--"It had a lot of sentimental value to me. I went through a lot with that car," he says. And so Steve took up the only other option.
At that time, no one was supplying the necessary patch panels for the ragged body. Fortunately, Dominick had hired a talented body man, Luis Periera, who had learned his trade crafting motor coaches in his native Uruguay. There was nothing he couldn't do with a piece of sheet steel.
"He said that in Uruguay, a man's labor cost less than a gallon of Bondo," said Santo, who, with Frank, today runs the shop founded by their late father. "So if it took a man a day to smooth everything out with hammer and dolly, it was worth it." Luis fabricated new inner and outer rocker panels, floor pans, and all four wheel arches. These he welded in place with a gas torch, the tool of the Old World craftsman. So skillful was he that "there was hardly any Bondo in that car at all," Steve says.
Using chemical stripper, Steve painstakingly stripped the body down to bare metal, including the aluminum hood, trunklid and outer door skins. Once it had been primed, filled and block-sanded, the car was sprayed with several coats of PPG Deltron paint. Steve kept the car red, but chose a brighter shade from the Toyota MR2 palette.
Many mechanical parts came from Tom Sheehan's Lancia Parts Consortium near Pittsburgh, while the brake calipers were re-sleeved by White Post Restorations. Typically, Santo says, Lancias are rewarding cars to work on. "The materials they used were the best in the business," he says. "They're a car made to appeal to the mechanic's eye, not the engineer's eye."
As the project progressed, Steve was fortunate to learn about Mike Kristick, a Pennsylvania-based supplier of salvaged and new-old-stock parts for Lancias. "He became my guardian angel," Steve says. "I got all the parts I needed from him, and then some." Kristick supplied a good used replacement for the badly rusted front subframe on Steve's car, as well as a key part of the interior: a good set of door panels to replace the originals, which had had holes cut in them for speakers.
New interior parts were virtually impossible to find. The front seats were sent to Kristick, who had them recovered by an upholsterer in Pennsylvania; Uncle Armand, an architect who built custom furniture, restored the wood veneered dashboard and the wood-rimmed steering wheel. The floors had been covered by rubber mats when the car was new, but new mats were hard to acquire; Steve had carpeting made by a Long Island shop.
One last detail was the installation of the "cow bell" that had once been under the hood of Uncle Armand's Aurelia. What's a cow bell? "While driving your Lancia on the back country roads of the town of Avellino in Italy on a Sunday morning going to church, you would come upon a herd of cows that would be crossing a two-lane road, just taking their time," Steve explains. "You would stop, of course. Therein lies the need for the cow bell--a couple of dings and you got Elsie, her family and her friends moving, so you could move also."
Throughout the nine-year restoration process, "Frank, Santo and Dominick were my guardian angels," Steve says. "They taught me patience. Take your time. Don't rush, because if you rush, you're going to break something."
Steve uses the car at least once a week during good weather, and, though it's obviously well looked after, he considers it a driver. He puts Rotella 15-40W in the crankcase, and reports that the V-4 seems perfectly happy to run on the premium unleaded he puts in the tank. The car rolls on radials, as it did when new, but these are 165-13s on aftermarket BWA alloys, rather than the original 145-14s on steel wheels.
He's owned Alfas and Fiats, and admires both marques, but Lancia has been something special to Steve. "I don't want to say it's a cult following, but it's something that gets into you. It's a fun car, and the people that I've known since I've been in the Lancia club since I was 16 or 17 are a nice group of people from all over the country. Lots of characters, and lots of stories."

This article originally appeared in the December, 2013 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.